Jingles

Although we do not have accurate figures, we can say that in the past 30+ years several hundreds of jingles and promos have been produced. Jingles have always played an important role on FRS Holland and make up a very creative part of the radio hobby. The very first set of jingles was recorded in the Summer of 1980, just before FRS' official launch. That set of jingles was produced in Dutch, German & English. It became popular among many listeners because it sounded rather freaky. It perfectly fitted in with the general free radio way of thinking, at least: that was the reaction of most listeners!

As far as the production of the jingles was concerned, it happened in two stages: Joop ter Zee always did the mixing/mastering part of the job including the music beds, sound effects etc. while Peter Verbruggen wrote most of the lyrics. In the early days our main tools so to speak were a few cassette decks and more important: a 4 track Akai tape recorder having a dubbing facility. Using that recorder on a 19cm/s speed enabled us to edit fairly accurately. It was a very time consuming job, particularly when a jingle had to be dubbed a number of times or when several effects were added.

Time after time fresh new jingles and promos were recorded. Generally speaking you may conclude that as the years went by, the jingles became less freaky but certainly more creative and technically of a higher standard. By the end of 1983 FRS Holland decided to spend some money and a small set of sonovox jingles and one voice over were ordered from Steve England's famous Alfasound company in Manchester. Alfasounds voice over who covered FRS-Holland's slogan "A Balance between Music & Information joined to one format, the FRS‑Holland sound tastes diferent, just a bit different" and proved to be a timeless jingle over the years. Many different cuts have been produced over the years, all by Joop ter Zee. A few years later- in late 1986‑ FRS‑Holland ordered a set of jingles from PAMS UK. This set contained a number of sonovox jingles and voice‑overs done by the famous Bill Mitchell.

In the late 1980s an American friend started doing voice-overs and he's still involved nowadays. It goes like this: Peter forwards the lyrics to New York our US person records them and returns them. Mostly he records 4 or 5 different cuts from one single liner (text for one particular jingle). The first sessions were recorded on either cassette or tape, but living in the digital era these days, fresh material in mp3 or wav format is transferred via the internet.

Since 1990 FRS-Holland has a large and professional archive of production music in all formats and lengths at its disposal. In addition several CDs containing production elements have been acquired mainly from American companies. Since 2009 a new and very professional European (English language) male voice started doing voice over work for FRS-Holland, taking over most jobs from our US person. Not to forget: once FRS also hired an American female voice over, that was in December 2007. Nice anecdote: when we sent the lyrics over the internet we used ‘SW’ as being a common abbreviation for Short Wave. But apparently that lady wasn’t aware of this fact and so we received our liners with 'SW' [S-double U] rather than ‘Short Wave’. As a result all jingles containing the words ‘Short Wave’ had to be re-recorded…. Quite hilarious!

Returning to the subject of producing jingles: since the early 1990s new techniques were available ánd being used. Since the introduction of the MiniDisc (MD), this fine piece of equipment took over the role of the tape recorder. An MD recorder contains many editting functions improving the speed and technical quality of any recording session. A further major step was the use of a 16-bit computer soundcard in combination with semi-professional software (Cool Edit; nowadays Adobe Audition). The actual results were and still are excellent, things which were (nearly) impossible to do in the past can nowadays be achieved quite easily. In 1999 FRS-Holland produced a Jingle CD entitled 'From Pro 7 to MD' reflecting almost 20 years of FRS jingling. The CD was produced by Joop ter Zee & Peter Verbruggen and contained an 8 page booklet with information about the FRS jingles. Apart from the aforementioned voice-overs, FRS also used a professional German one.